“For me, graphics programs are spiritual tools that allow one to psychedelically engage with the fabric of reality. I'm deeply committed to pushing the innovative possibilities inherent in these contemporary folk art tools.” - Brenna MurphyAmerican Medium is pleased to present skyface~TerraceDomain, Brenna Murphy’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, which showcase recent prints and sculptures derived from Murphy’s virtual objects and spaces. The prints are “photographs” of 3D rendered scapes inhabited by entities; drawings, extruded into three dimensions, and arranged within virtual space. Borrowing from the image making traditions of cultures around the world, her complex labyrinths offer meditations on human perception. Forms drawn by a human hand manifest in virtual space as stone, liquid, and unreal materials in impossible perspectives punctuating limitless expanses or clinging in dense clusters - swimming in distorted reflections and glowing lights. Murphy’s virtual spaces can be explored, not only in the space of our minds, but in virtual spaces accessed using digital devices. The works in skyface~TerraceDomain take the form of print and sculpture to suit their presentation in a gallery. These same images and objects can be created, as Murphy says, “in navigable virtual worlds using video game development software”. Her work’s ability to be both physical and virtual is wonderfully perplexing. A question arises: “Is it real?” With continuing advances in virtual reality and digitally-aided fabrication the more interesting question is “How can it be made real?” These questions have been approached by mystic traditions through the ages. They evoke the Buddhist notion of Maya: “The limited, purely physical and mental reality in which our everyday consciousness has become entangled.” The oscillation of Murphy’s work between virtual and physical reality is analogous to the gap between our shared physical experience and the virtual reality of our individual consciousnesses. Her imagined forms can be made visible through code translated and output as light patterns on a screen or as 3D prints, laser-cuts, or any other method of computer-aided fabrication into our shared physical space. Advancing technology is enabling the inner space of our individual minds to be translated into our shared physical space with more and more accuracy. There is a near future when this translation will be simultaneous, when advanced software and hardware allow us to craft our experience of Maya. With the bridge between our individual consciousnesses and our shared environment being strengthened by new technologies, concerns arise over whose consciousness will be made manifest. Brenna Murphy chooses to devote herself to a practice of meditation - producing vast online catalogs of beautiful forms and splendid synesthetic virtual spaces. While Murphy’s work, at first glance, may not seem to be political (partially because of it’s beauty), her work presents a peaceful, psychedelic vision of a possible reality. Brenna’s position is contrary to the dominant world-view and threatening to the cult of egoism we find ourselves at the mercy of. Murphy said when describing her hybrid practice and the increasing links between the virtual and the real, “I'm one of many artists working to exploit this situation, with the goal of knitting ourselves into an undulating meta-mind shaped for spiritual attunement with the mesh of all planes of existence.” One can only hope that when the near future arrives, where the imagined becomes the perceived, that artists like Brenna Murphy will guide us.